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Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): For many years, New York theaters steered clear of plays dealing with Palestine—most infamously the Public Theater during the First intifada, which cancelled a scheduled touring production from East Jerusalem’s El-Hakawati Theater, and the New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), which backed away from a production of My Name is Rachel Corrie in 2006. Both institutions have long since course corrected. After some foundering, the Public Theater has produced important Palestinian works in the last couple of years, among them Mona Mansour’s The Vagrant Trilogy, an absorbing epic about Palestinian displacement and dispossession, and Fouad Dakwar’s beguiling pop-punk musical-in-progress, Fouad of Nazareth. NYTW quickly moved to make up for the Rachel Corrie fiasco, and started to work with the Freedom Theater in Jenin, among other initiatives.
Over the horrendous last 15 months, stages across the country have seen much more work by and/or about Palestinians. While that has not been the case on Broadway and for the biggest regional theaters, in general, the theater world, at last, has not exerted anywhere near the level of anti-Palestinian repression that has plagued the art world recently. Just as the ceasefire deal was announced, I caught two stirring examples, playing right across the street from each other on the Lower East Side: The Mulberry Tree by Hanna Eady and Edward Mast at La Mama and, in a co-production with the Under the Radar festival, A Knock on the Roof by Khawla Ibraheem at NYTW (running through February 16th). (This month, Under the Radar and La Mama also presented The Horse of Jenin, which I didn’t have a chance to see.)
Knock (whose script was published in a chapbook for Jewish Currents subscribers last year) is equal parts charming and harrowing. With just a chair on an otherwise bare stage (plus some haunting shadow effects), Ibraheem plays Mariam, a young, frustrated mom in Gaza, who speaks directly to the audience, with warmth and wit. Aesthetically, then, the play resembles innumerable one-woman confessional shows of the last several decades, and the familiar form helps bring us straight inside Mariam’s mind.
But occupation and bombardment render the familiar brilliantly strange. Like the dishes of many a disgruntled housewife, Mariam’s sit in the sink—but here, it’s because of electricity blackouts that disable running water. She tells her six-year-old son that it is too dangerous to swim in the sea—because open sewage pollutes it. Her husband who is studying abroad can’t make it home for Ramadan—he can’t get cleared through the checkpoint. These domestic woes become subsumed by Mariam’s intensifying, and ultimately tragic, obsession: preparing to grab essentials and flee in the five minutes between a “knock on the roof”—a low-impact munition that the Israeli military shoots at a residential building as a warning—and the start of full-on bombing. She repeatedly describes a ritualized practice routine of gathering up her son (in the form of a pillowcase stuffed with weighty objects for her nightly practice), dashing down seven flights of stairs to the street, and sprinting as far away as she can in those five minutes. Though written in 2017, Knock feels entirely of this moment, with its evocations of buildings reduced to rubble and the relentless clangor of explosions.
The Mulberry Tree, on the other hand, takes place decades in the past; seeing this play, which unfolds between 1942 and 1948, within just a couple of days of Knock underscored for me the straight line that runs from the Nakba to now. The Mulberry Tree centers on the relationship between a rabbi and a neighboring Palestinian boy named Noor. The action develops against the backdrop of major events in Israel’s founding—the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel, the UN Partition Plan, the expulsion of Palestinians—with these incidents depicted through their impact on the mundane and intimate lives of Noor, the rabbi, and their families. Though the rabbi insists that as both an Arab and a Jew he cannot choose sides, history eventually forces him to become an Israeli, if only because he can stay where he is, while Noor and his relatives are driven away. Noor makes a surreptitious trip back to check on his family’s house and on the rabbi, whom he’d entrusted with their key, only to find that all the Palestinian homes in the village have been appropriated by Jews. The sense of betrayal is heartbreaking, most of all because we have seen how, once upon a time—before the triumph of statist Zionism—Jews and Palestinians could live amicably as neighbors.
Jonathan Shamir (contributing writer): In Elia Suleiman’s 2019 film It Must Be Heaven, the director’s character is told by a French producer that the company will not take his new film because it is “not enough about Palestine.” This line encapsulates a dilemma that has always existed for Palestinian artists, and which has become almost inescapable since October 7th: the expectation, or even the duty, to address “the cause” on the one hand, and its heavy burden on artistic freedom, on the other.
Written before but published amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Yasmin Zaher’s novel The Coin is a provocative and exhilarating rejoinder to that question. Although Palestine surfaces in sporadic memories, the book’s glamorous and unabashed narrator is less concerned with her homeland than with a clean break from her past: She incessantly scrubs her apartment and body, gets swept up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and, as a teacher at a mostly Black middle school, rolls out her unorthodox and brutally realist pedagogy. The title refers to a silver shekel that the narrator swallowed on a road trip to the Negev Desert with her family years earlier, and which she is convinced is mystically shaping her fate from a point on her back that she cannot reach through the extensive self-cleaning routine that she dubs a “CVS retreat.” Like the narrator and her silver shekel, I swallowed The Coin. It took me less than a day to finish.
What I found most compelling about The Coin was its straight-talking narrative voice. Zaher’s protagonist doesn’t express much sentiment at life’s ups and downs, even when recalling her parents’ premature death in a traffic accident. She always keeps her emotions and relations at a distance, including about her years-long relationship with Sasha. “I never thought of him when he wasn’t there . . . I would have preferred a relationship of passion, but I always need one foot on the ground,” she explains. The detachment is like the cleanliness: It is a way of asserting control in an otherwise unpredictable and unforgiving world. The narrator unashamedly confesses that she expects “a certain kind of life” that is both in her hands and just out of reach. Even though she is the heiress to half of her family’s millions, she is left “simultaneously rich and poor,” as the money is locked away in line with her father’s will, and she receives only a steady income to sustain her life of controlled luxury in New York. This material limbo also serves as a springboard for the novel’s subversive exploration of prejudice that is not the exclusive remit of white Americans, such as anti-Black racism and obsession with class status, and how they trouble but don’t necessarily prevent our sympathies.
In one of her most vivid childhood memories, relayed toward the end of the novel, the narrator talks about her estrangement from a Jewish Israeli friend after discovering remnants of pre-Nakba Palestinian life in their home. “I was old enough to know right from wrong,” she says with clarity. And yet she also asserts that the rules of right and wrong may need bending in this topsy-turvy world. “I used to think that if people saw the real face of wickedness, not the mask, then they would revolt. I used to be a proponent of transparency. When Netanyahu and Trump were elected I thought those were good days, because the truth had come to light. But it seemed not only that the truth was ugly, but also that ugly was beautiful. The people adore the monster.” In its unapologetic licentiousness and materialism, and in its searingly honest voice, Zaher revels in the hypocrisy that is perhaps unavoidable and forever pervasive when America is “both the key and the curse.” In doing so, she seems to be giving license for Palestinians to be as ugly and complicated as any other people, even when they’re clad in high fashion.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I first saw I’m Still Here—Walter Salles’s remarkable new film about the disappearance of an opposition activist during the military dictatorship that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985—at the New York Film Festival this past fall. I was sitting next to a young Brazilian woman, and as we chatted I asked her what she would pose to the director if the opportunity presented itself. She told me that she’d like to know if he thought the film could spread awareness of what went on during that period and make people confront its legacy. My question was not an abstract one; I knew I’d be interviewing Salles the next day for Cineaste. I duly asked Salles the woman’s question, and he expressed hope that it would indeed serve this function in Brazil—which, unlike Argentina and Uruguay, has never truly reckoned with the truth of its past.
Salles’s hopes have been amply fulfilled. Over three million Brazilians have seen I’m Still Here in theaters, and it has sparked important conversations about the nation’s history. Such discussion is particularly essential now, when this terrible moment has been so recently on the brink of recurring: In January of 2023, supporters of outgoing president Jair Bolsonaro refused to accept his loss to Lula da Silva and stormed the capital complex in Brasilia in an attempt to stage a coup d’état. Rarely has a political film come at such a propitious moment and to such good effect.
The film, which has received two Oscar nominations, recounts the disappearance of real-life former congressman Rubens Paiva, who assisted opponents of the military government until he was taken from his home by the military in 1971 and never seen again. His wife Eunice spent years trying to get to the bottom of her husband’s fate, a quest that led her to law school and a career as a human rights lawyer. (The unquestionable star of the film is Fernanda Torres, who plays Eunice, portraying her as steely, unrelenting, and quietly heroic, committed both to uncovering the truth and to holding her family together.) Decades later, it was confirmed that Paiva had been tortured and murdered the day after he was taken away.
Salles, whose own family fled Brazil for a time after the coup, was friends with one of the Paiva daughters; the film is thus not only a work of political homage and memory, but a return to his own adolescence and a reckoning with his own past. It’s a beautifully crafted work. The first half hour, which takes place while the family is still together and living life to the fullest, is shot with a constantly moving camera, to a backdrop of the Brazilian pop of the time; after Rubens is disappeared, so too are the bright light, music, and movement. All elements of this masterpiece serve to express the profound tragedy of what was done to Rubens and his family—and to Brazil.
Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Former President Jimmy Carter broke many American taboos about Middle East diplomacy after leaving the White House. He visited Gaza in 2009 and saw the damage wrought by the Israeli military on schools and homes. He met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal even though the United States government designated the militant organization as a terrorist group. And he publicly and unequivocally described Palestinian inequality under Israeli occupation as apartheid. But when Carter passed away last month, it felt like many players in the Democratic foreign policy establishment, by focusing exclusively on his four years in Washington, were rewriting his legacy to erase his advocacy on behalf of Palestinians. For example, Biden’s outgoing USAID administrator Samantha Power, in a New York Times opinion essay, heralded his human rights legacy without so much as mentioning Palestinians.
So I picked up Carter’s 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book is unlike any I’ve read by a head of state or politician. Carter is curious and humble, informed by his extensive conversations with Israelis, Palestinians, and actors from Arab states. He is forthright about his Christian faith and connection to the Holy Land, yet the material throughout is meticulously reported. One particularly compelling chapter, “The Wall as a Prison,” offers his analysis of day-to-day life under occupation, which he presents to Israeli interlocutors as part of the book’s narrative. At one point, he grills then-President of the Supreme Court of Israel Aharon Barak about the situation in the occupied territories and pushes him to see Israeli oppression firsthand, to which Barak shrugs that he’s a judge, not an investigator.
Carter’s analysis is anything but radical, yet the backlash against the book’s publication in 2006 was intense. Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg called Carter “cynical” and “anti-historical.” Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt, who has served as Biden’s State Department envoy for combating antisemitism, wrote that he “relied on anti-Semitic stereotypes.” But neither attack reckoned with Carter’s actual ideas. The relatively early use, for the United States establishment, of that word “apartheid” made it so the likes of Goldberg and Lipstadt couldn’t hear what he was saying—which is too bad; it’s a sober and fair book that consistently takes into account Israel’s security concerns while offering legitimate criticism grounded in history, law, and eye-witness accounts.
Carter, in 1977, was the first American president to call for a Palestinian “homeland” (notably, not a state). But, in actuality, the Camp David accords he negotiated between Israel and Egypt cut out Palestinians. The treaty had the effect of “enshrining a perpetual condition of statelessness” for the Palestinians, according to Seth Anziska, author of Preventing Palestine: A Political History from Camp David to Oslo. Yet this process seems to have driven the former president to redouble his diplomatic efforts as a private citizen in the decades that followed. “If you want to understand the Carter of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, you need to think about the pain and disenchantment he felt about the failures of the Camp David process,” Anziska told me in 2023. “There’s a self-reflection, a nuance, and an observation of detail, and a desire to affect political change on the basis of actual reality that animates how he thinks about policy.”
Choosing peace over apartheid, as Carter put it bluntly but clearly, is a decision that everyone must face. “It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail,” he wrote. It was not only the warning of an idealist, seeking equal rights for Palestinians, but the exhortation of a pragmatist who understood the imperative of a just resolution for Palestinians.
Nathan Goldman (managing editor): In the last days of 2024, my hopes of catching a screening of horror auteur Robert Eggers’s visually exquisite new film Nosferatu while my twin sons napped were nearly dashed, thanks to a terror that has recently gripped my kids—a fear of shadows. With minutes to spare, my wife and I managed to assuage their concerns about the faceless shapes passing over the walls and usher them to sleep, and I rushed off to the theater. As soon as the movie began, with a shot of a young woman named Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) pleading to the camera, her face half-consumed by darkness, I realized the irony of the situation: I’d assured my children that shadows are nothing to be afraid of only to go experience an artwork premised on the legitimacy of that very fear.
Indeed, Eggers’s Nosferatu—a remake of F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 masterpiece, itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula—is essentially made from the menace of shadows. For most of the film’s runtime, the vampiric visage of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is shrouded, conjuring uncertainty and anticipation that haunt the viewer. Seemingly inspired by the unforgettable shots of the monster’s silhouette from Murnau’s original—which Eggers explicitly pays homage to in shots of his own—this new Nosferatu seizes on shadows as its central metaphor for evil. When Ellen’s strapping and naive husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), tasked with selling a decrepit mansion to the mysterious count, stops to rest at an inn close to Orlok’s castle, the innkeeper’s wife warns him, “Beware his shadow. The shadow covers you in nightmare. Awake, but a dream. There is no escape.” Later, after a terrifying encounter with the vampire leaves Thomas petrified and on the brink of death, the Roma religious novice who nurses him back to health observes, “You are lost in his shadow.”
But, as is already clear from that opening shot of Ellen’s face, it is not only the monster whose essence is expressed through this image. At one point, the young woman—plagued by frightening visions and premonitions, and increasingly convinced of her own inherent sinfulness—demands to know, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” This is perhaps the central question of Eggers’s rendition of the classic vampire tale. And while the film’s key innovation on its source material is to explore the particular relationship between Orlok and Ellen, presenting each as the other’s shadow in service of a feminist reflection on men’s efforts to constrain women’s appetites, it’s also interested in the more capacious framing of Ellen’s question. Silhouette portraits linger constantly in the background of the film’s interiors, a subtle reminder of the shadows we each cast—and attempt to domesticate. In one of the film’s most delightfully melodramatic monologues, discredited occult expert Albin Eberheart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) exclaims to a rationalist skeptic, “We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled with the angel in Peniel and I must tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.” If there is little that’s surprising or unfamiliar in Eggers’s Nosferatu, it nonetheless masterfully orchestrates an encounter with this darkness, and renews its hold on our imagination.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Oceans Are the Real Continents, the debut feature by Italian director Tomasso Santambrogi, is a perfect portrait of despair—of the death of the revolutionary dream. This beautiful film, shot in stunning black and white, tells the intersecting stories of three sets of characters in a small town in Cuba, leaving no room for the illusions that once sustained that nation’s idealism, and which have been effaced through decades of rationing, repression, and decay.
Indeed, for the contemporary Cubans depicted here, flight is the only hope left—abroad, or into a vanished past. The desire to get out moves even children: When two little boys speak constantly of “Yankees,” they’re not referring to the country that invaded and blockaded their own, but to the baseball team they believe they’ll one day join; their future lies to the north, and everything is pointed in that direction. Edith, a young puppeteer, has two preoccupations: preparing a show and gathering the paperwork she needs to go to Italy. She has no idea what she’ll do there, or what might await her, but that uncertainty is better than the grim predictability of her life in Cuba. Milagros, an elderly woman who never speaks a word, lives alone and sits daily at her kitchen table to read a lover’s letters sent from Angola in 1989, when the Cuban army, fulfilling its internationalist duty, was sent to Africa to help defend the freed colony from attacks by South Africa and the Namibian rebel army of SWAPO. The letters tell of ubiquitous death and destruction, voicing increasing worry and despair, but also of forthcoming gifts and his hopes for his return. Every day Milagros—played movingly by Milagros Llanes Martínez—leaves the house and heads to the town’s rundown train station, where she still expects to find her lover. In the film’s final shot, all the characters are at this station, waiting futilely or preparing to depart.
In Oceans Are the Real Continents the revolutionary glories of the Cuban past are all but absent, so it’s instructive to watch it alongside Mikahil Kalatozov’s 1964 film I Am Cuba. Made while the nation was just coming into its heyday as a shining socialist light for the peoples of the Third World, it too opens on scenes of great despair—but it is the despair of Havanans and peasants under the Batista regime, propped up by the US. If Oceans Are the Real Continents dwells entirely in anguish, I Am Cuba moves from desperation to rebellion: first in the city, with the heroic struggle of the students at the University of Havana, and then with the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra mountains. The film ends on a joyous scene of the fighters making their way down to the streets of Havana, among them actors bearing perfect resemblances to Camilo Cienfuegos and Fidel and Raul Castro. In a way, the entire history of the Cuban Revolution can be told by splicing these films together, end to end.
Mari Cohen (associate editor): It may be 2025 now, but I’ve spent the last week listening to the fruits of my final labor of 2024: a comprehensive playlist of my favorite songs released last year. (Apple Music version here, for those of you admirably using the lesser-evil streaming service.) I’ve been doing this annually for seven years now, and, as tends to happen to rituals over time, my yearly project has expanded: My ambitions have only gotten grander and more completionist, my playlists more sprawling and eclectic. Making the finishing touches on December 31st, I had to remind myself that my goal was to make a little playlist of music I like for fun, not permanently capture and honor the essence of any good 2024 song that might exist. Whether it was worth the consternation, who knows, but I do think I eventually compiled a banger of a playlist.
My top album last year was the indie rock band Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven, which weaves one irresistible pop hook after another in between cathartic screamy vocals. Some of my other favorites were albums that I had initially deemed overhyped: I liked MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks, a record of wry songs about being pathetic, but couldn’t quite get what differentiated him from other indie rock dudes enough to earn him so much breathless critical acclaim; then, I saw him live (in a room packed with mustachioed Brooklyn men, of course) and immediately became hooked on the guitar riffs of simultaneously plaintive and goofy songs like “On My Knees.” (It was a good year in general for indie rock dudes, thanks also to Father John Misty, Los Campesinos!, Fontaines DC, This is Lorelai, Vampire Weekend, and the genre-classification-defying Mk.gee.) I had found Waxahatchee’s Americana record Tigers Blood enjoyable but a bit too similar to her 2020 masterpiece, St. Cloud. But upon relistening to this latest album, I was struck by the airtight construction of each song. (Also good in the folky singer-songwriter department this year: albums by Hurray from the Riff Raff and Willi Carlisle.) And I’ve gotten a little tired of seeing every project related to the band Big Thief showered with uniform and predictable critical praise—some of their albums are actually better than others!—but I have to hand it to frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s latest solo effort, Bright Future, which almost had me in tears from the first song, “Real House,” a spare, haunting tune about childhood. Also notable last year were Charly Bliss’s ecstatic power pop on Forever, British songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s infectious melodies on My Method Actor, and Cassandra Jenkins’s spacey, poetic meditations on My Light, My Destroyer.
As usual, I had help from music critics’ end-of-year roundups, which pointed me to good releases I had missed; I’m especially grateful to the Chicago-based critic Josh Terry’s year-end list, as well as Stereogum’s Top 50 Albums. However, besides those two, I found that reading through most music publications’ end-of-year lists wasn’t as fun as usual. Maybe it’s because I was mystified by some of the biggest albums this year: As much as it pains me not to give all my support to a fellow five-foot-tall woman, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short and Sweet just sounds like run-of-the-mill pop to me. I had plenty of fun with Charli xcx’s BRAT over the summer, but she’s had punchier lyrics and more memorable melodies on other projects. (In the Big Pop department, I’d pick Billie Eilish’s and Beyoncé’s 2024 albums above either of those two.) And while I think it’s good that Taylor Swift’s gargantuan status didn’t grant her unwarranted laurels for the messy The Tortured Poets Department, I also think that in writing off the album as a whole, many have missed some genuinely good songs, like the classic Swiftian breakup tune “The Black Dog” or the self-conscious critique of the entertainment industry “Clara Bow”—both more interesting than anything Sabrina Carpenter could write. Sorry! Good thing I get to make the rules on my playlist. And hopefully you’ll find something you like on it too.
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): Many American Jews are raised to regard Christmas with some mixture of loathing and envy. Not me. I grew up in a decidedly Judeo-normative New York milieu, and well into my twenties, I consequently felt no more strongly about Santa, wreaths, stockings, and Yule logs (whatever those are) than your average Presbyterian feels about a lulav and etrog. And so when, in college, I first watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960), it was lost on me that it was a movie preoccupied with Christmas. Preoccupied, that is, in the sense one might say that Luigi Mangione was preoccupied with health-insurance executives. For Wilder (born, of course, Shmuel Vilder, in Eastern Europe’s Galicia), as I learned when I revisited the film last week, was a prophet, a militant vanguard in the struggle against what the kids call Christian hegemony, the John Brown, if you will, of that glorious revolutionary struggle now known as The War on Christmas.
Thus The Apartment is the perfect hangover cure for those groggy weeks following enforced conviviality and over-eating. C.C. Baxter (Jack Lemon), a literally sniveling white-collar flunky at an insurance company, allows his superiors to conduct their adulterous trysts at his eponymous apartment, in hopes of climbing the corporate ladder. When he discovers that senior executive Jeff Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray) is sleeping with and badly mistreating Baxter’s unrequited crush, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), an elevator operator in the company building, he must choose between his romantic idealism and his corporate ambitions.
The Apartment scandalized audiences with its frank, cynical look at the tawdry sex lives of Manhattan office workers. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, directors like Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz were testing the limits of the Hays Code, guidelines for censorship that barred nudity and profanity, any “inference of sex perversion,” and the like. More subtly, though, the film, which largely plays out in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, is daringly caustic about phony, secularized American Christianity. When Sheldrake gives Kubelik a $100 bill as a Christmas gift, for instance, it clarifies their relationship’s transactional, commercial logic, even as he insists that she not be depressed on Christmas. Wilder pointedly shows us, several scenes later, Sheldrake unwrapping presents with his son in his suburban, single-family home, a domesticity as glittering and ephemeral as their decked-out tree. Nor is it just Sheldrake who sees in Christmas something other than peace on earth and goodwill to all men: The company’s Christmas party is depicted as a pagan bacchanal, a festival of intoxication and sexual harassment. When Baxter is at his lowest, on Christmas Eve, having just realized that he has been lending his apartment to his romantic rival for Kubelik’s affections, he gets drunk at a bar with a Santa Claus impersonator, who is indignant about the bar closing; the bartender points out it’s Christmas, and the actor replies, “I know. I work for the outfit.” In this movie, Santa Claus is an illusion: The reality is exploitative work and weary despair.
As an antidote to Christian hypocrisy, The Apartment offers Jewish moral critique, dispensed by Baxter’s neighbor, Dr. Dreyfuss (Jack Kruschen). Dreyfuss ministers to Kubelik after she attempts to kill herself with sleeping pills; he refuses to allow her to sleep, giving her liters of coffee and repeatedly slapping her. Through this implicit ritual of disenchantment, he is exorcising her unrealistic attachment to the dybbuk Sheldrake. Just as he tends to Kubelik, so he diagnoses and treats Baxter’s soul; under the misimpression that it is Baxter who has abused Kubelik, Dreyfuss admonishes him to “be a mensch,” which he translates as “be a human being.” Menschlichkeit represents a softer, more humane Jewish masculinity, an alternative to that proffered by Baxter’s superiors. (Dreyfuss’s wife offers Kubelik chicken soup and refuses to let Baxter clean the dishes, ostensibly because she fears he’ll break them; I assume her real concern is that he will treif them.) In the film’s climax, on New Year’s Eve, Baxter stands up to Sheldrake and explains that he finally intends to “be a mensch,” even at the expense of his career. He is, in other words, renouncing the goyishe naches of professional advancement. And the movie is suggesting that viewers might similarly dispense with the middle-class hoopla, spectacle, and frenzied consumption of the holidays in favor of modest, Yiddish-inflected ethical responsibility. As New Year’s resolutions go, I have heard worse.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Toward the end of The Last Republican, Steve Pink’s new documentary on Adam Kinzinger—the former Republican congressman who lost his seat for voting to impeach Trump—denies that there was anything heroic about his actions. “We,” he says, referring to himself and Liz Cheney, “were surrounded by cowards.” In this simple sentence, Kinzinger provides a snappy and accurate description of America in 2025.
Kinzinger is not a man to idolize. He is, after all, a conservative ideologue: an unconditional admirer of Ronald Reagan who rode the Tea Party wave into office, and who voted with Trump more than 90% of the time. Still, however odious his politics may be, there’s no denying that it does require a certain amount of courage to take a position that will not only cost you your job, but will also earn you mockery, hatred, and death threats. By the time of the hearings of the January 6 Commission—of which he and Cheney were the only two GOP members—Kinzinger and his wife required 24/7 protection. To emphasize the contrast with the overwhelming majority of the party, Pink skillfully employs clips of top Republicans like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell condemning Trump in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup juxtaposed with those from just weeks later, in which they bend at the knee and kiss Trump’s ring. To have stood firm, as Kinzinger did, was an admirable act. Pink isn’t shy about displaying his disdain for Kinzinger’s politics. But what makes The Last Republican interesting is precisely the fact that the former congressman holds to his values, rather than presenting himself—or allowing himself to be presented—as a Democrat manqué. For Kinzinger, it’s his church-going, patriotic values that drove him to take the stand he did.
If Kinzinger is wrong about not being courageous, every day brings further proof of ubiquitous cowardice. We are now living in, as Dalton Trumbo dubbed the McCarthy era, “The Time of the Toad.” At every level, individuals and institutions—Disney, Bezos, Google, media conglomerates, journalists—are competing to show how low they can go to kowtow to The Leader. Despite claims to the contrary, it seems there was never really a Trump Resistance. Even the fate of The Last Republican embodies this pervasive gutlessness. Film distributors, The New York Times recently reported, are shying away from distribution of progressive films, including Pink’s and others on domestic dissent—as well as those on Israel/Palestine like The Bibi Files and No Other Land. Perhaps we’re living through what the French call a “retreat,” in order to leap further. We’ll see.
The Jewish Currents staff will be off the next two weeks to recharge, so there we won’t be publishing content or the Shabbat Reading List (though you can still look out for the weekly parshah commentary). See you in 2025!
Diana Varenik (director of circulation): In 2003, a dozen Palestinian teenagers erected a 16-foot-tall horse at the entrance of the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. The piece was titled “Al Hisan,” or “the horse,” and for 20 years it was both commemorative—its body made from the rubble of buildings and vehicles destroyed by Israeli forces—and celebratory, a monument to enduring Palestinian resistance after the Second Intifada. On October 29, 2023, an Israeli raid targeted and destroyed Al Hisan.
I learned this and much else at The Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus, which the political puppet troupe Bread and Puppet recently performed at the Theater for the New City. The circus opens with the demise of a clown puppet bearing a sign that reads “empire” (and, with its demise, also the downfall of the contemporary beasts of Amazon, Nestle, Monsanto, and other corporate monsters). Bread and Puppet’s characteristic life-size papier-mâché figures, accompanied by an extremely zealous live brass band, then perform a non-linear series of vignettes: an homage to the Haitian Revolution, a tribute to healthcare workers, a march of screaming trees set to a stirring violin requiem, and a troupe of dancing fuschia piglets declaring forcefully that “the silly is a necessary ingredient of the serious.”
I admit that I entered the performance skeptical of Bread and Puppet, whose art and creative direction appear not to have changed significantly since the troupe’s early days in the anti-war era of the ‘60s. I visited the Bread and Puppet museum in Vermont earlier this year and found the artwork eerie and impenetrable. Absent the political context explored on stage, the puppets seemed to be empty signifiers alienated from the present.
But Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus was not out of touch. The show itself was startlingly relevant and forthright—whatever I had found enigmatic about the lifeless puppets in the museum was totally transformed in production. One macabre routine featured tigers ripping out and eating the entrails of billionaires, gruesomely returning some meaning to the oft-repeated slogan “eat the rich.” Some moments were extremely somber, including several tributes to Gazans murdered by Israeli forces over the last 14 months. One particularly rattling performance featured the story of Muhammad Bhar, a 24-year-old disabled Palestinian man who was mauled by an Israeli military dog and left to die after his family was forcibly removed from their home.
For me, the most memorable moment of the performance was a scene in which a performer narrated the story of the Jenin horse while the rest of the troupe brought out a 20-foot-long puppet of a person lying horizontally. Slowly, the puppeteers pulled pieces of the puppet’s body apart and rearranged them to produce two large horses. As the narrator described the destruction of Palestinian sites of culture and memory, the other performers re-shuffled the horse’s pieces. When the performers stepped aside so the audience could see the puppet, it had taken human shape once again—this time standing upright, and waving a Palestinian flag high above the audience.
Like Al Hisan, the metamorphosed puppet was a composite of objects that retained the memory of its prior selves, even as these components reformed again and again. And if such evolution is possible, the puppet suggests, then attempts at cultural destruction or erasure may ultimately be futile. I thought of the pieces that had once constituted Al Hisan—scraps from a Red Crescent ambulance which had carried the wounded, the building fragments which sheltered families, the pieces of cars which transported residents of Jenin to work and to school—and I thought of the rubble that may one day be given a voice in Gaza, in Jenin, and beyond.
Aside from the impressive artistry and emotional range of the performance, I think the reason I liked the show so much was to spite the men sitting behind me who grumbled throughout that they didn’t feel like being depressed (“Isn’t this supposed to be a circus?”) To them, I’d cite the fuschia piglets, who rightfully pointed out that the silly and the serious—indeed, even the tragic—cannot exist without each other. Beginning After the End of Humanity Circus is no longer playing, but Bread and Puppet Theater isn’t going anywhere. So don’t miss out next time these puppets take the stage near you!
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The recently opened Franz Kafka exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, marking 100 years since the death of the great author, provided me with more chills of excitement than almost any show I can remember seeing. This assemblage of manuscripts, diary pages, postcards, and letters allows the visitor to gaze upon the originals of some of the most important works ever written. Among works of art, only the end of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg moves me to tears—and yet, as I approached the display case containing the original manuscript of The Metamorphosis, and there, written clearly in Kafka’s hand, its famous opening words—Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt—I had tears in my eyes.
The page bearing this immortal line shows just how smoothly the writing of this novella went. The beginning of the story is written in the most relaxed and legible of hands, and the page contains only seven minor crossings-out; one sees how naturally this tale of a man turned into an insect came to Kafka—how immediate its experience was to him. Elsewhere, we see that this easy flow of prose was not uncommon for the writer, even though he often claimed that his works had to be wrenched from him. The final page of The Castle, for instance, moves along smoothly, with few corrections. But then it ends abruptly, mid-sentence: She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it is hard to understand her, but what she said— We’ll never know what the woman said, and the words hanging on the page make Kafka’s defeat all the more clear. Revelations such as these give this exhibition a greater value than the benefit inherent in being just inches from these basic texts of modern literature, of modern life.
The exhibition also works at undermining the image of Kafka as a lone genius, weighed down by the heavy responsibility of his talent. Loving postcards to his sister Ottla figure prominently, and they show that Kafka was not devoid of a sense of humor. One such missive is formally addressed to “sehr geehrte fräulein”—dearest miss—and continues in the same mock highfalutin tone. The photos of Kafka interspersed through the show, many of them taken in sanatoria where he stayed to cure his tuberculosis, show him simply having fun with friends. The curators make the case that some of the iconography of the tortured soul is a result of trickery: A famous photo of Kafka sitting alone, which appears on the cover of several books about him in English and French, is displayed here in its original form; it turns out that the author is not alone here at all, but sitting alongside a dog and a beautiful young woman, a waitress at a tavern he frequented.
For those interested in the question of Kafka’s relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, there is a whole section dedicated to this topic, including his fascination with Hebrew, which was linked to his interest in Zionism. The show features a letter he wrote in the language to his Hebrew teacher and a notebook with select words written out in German and in Hebrew. His Hebrew was obviously utilitarian rather than religious—“enema” and “fever” are among the words he cared to translate.
The next significant anniversary on the Kafka calendar—the bicentennial of his birth—is 59 years away, so those who care about literature have a long wait ahead of them before seeing an exhibition of this grandeur. It’s up until April.
Alex Kane (senior reporter): My idea of a break from my job—which entails consuming copious amounts of contemporary news about US and Middle East politics—is to read American history. It’s not exactly unrelated to my job, but it’s different enough. I started this practice in the hopes of better understanding the country I live in after being thoroughly destabilized by Donald Trump’s first win in 2016. Since then, I’ve read a lot about the American right, including, most recently, Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.
Like his earlier book Nixonland—which I previously raved about for the Shabbat Reading List—this book is a dizzying compendium of political events and pop culture happenings that Perlstein unearths to guide the reader from 1973 through 1976, when Richard Nixon resigned following the Watergate scandal and Gerald Ford took his place. Reagan is a central character in the book, although I often found myself wondering why Reagan was mentioned in the subtitle when he would not become president until 1980. In fact, much of the book is devoted to Reagan’s formidable, but ultimately losing, quest to defeat the establishment-minded Ford in the 1976 Republican presidential primary. But in losing—notably, less badly than one might have expected in a primary against an incumbent president—the former California governor activated a right-wing network of business leaders, evangelicals, and Cold War hawks who jolted the Republican establishment and would make up the core of the Reagan coalition when he eventually won in 1980.
In addition to its main plot—the rise of Reagan as a political force—the book has a series of subplots that kept me engaged: a mini-biography of the shapeshifting Reagan, an exploration of Congress’s transformation in the wake of voter backlash to Watergate, the roots of the myth that hundreds of American soldiers were left captive and abandoned by the Johnson administration in Vietnam, and much more. The book was a perfect way to fill in my previously lackluster historical knowledge of this era. The 1960s and the Reagan years have clear ideological origins and lasting impacts, but the early- to mid-1970s have long been a black box to me. The Invisible Bridge clarified those interregnum years, making plain how a mix of inflation, Middle East wars, radical left-wing movements, and changing gender norms set the stage for a conservative counter-revolution that would ultimately coalesce in a president winning on the slogan “let’s make America great again.”
Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I started reading (and then writing for) Jewish Currents after its 2018 revival, and like many converts, I am both curious about and frankly ignorant of my adoptive community’s long history. Consequently, I took a special interest in Annie Sommer Kaufman’s new translation of Ben Gold’s Your Comrade, Avreml Broide: A Worker’s Life Story. Gold’s Yiddish novel was originally published in 1944 by the Communist newspaper Morgen Freiheit, which after World War II launched the English magazine Jewish Life, which became Jewish Currents in 1956. Since I don’t read Yiddish, Avreml Broide felt like a recovered family archive—and even with Kaufman’s learned and generous introduction and William Gropper’s original illustrations, reading this slim volume will hardly take much longer than flipping through an unearthed photo album of a precious ancestor.
And Gold is indeed our political forebear. Born in Bessarabia, a province of the Russian Empire today split between Ukraine and Moldova, he immigrated as a child to New York in 1910. At the age of 14, he joined the Furriers Union, leading its heroic 1926 strike, which won, for the first time in the United States, a 40-hour workweek. Initially a Socialist, Gold became a staunch Communist, and fought both the conservative American Federation of Labor and organized crime outfits like Murder, Inc. for control of the needle-trades unions in New York. He served a prison sentence for organizing a hunger march during the Great Depression, and was prosecuted for his Communist affiliation in the second Red Scare.
Avreml Broide draws heavily from Gold’s life, barely fictionalizing events like the great 1926 strike and characters like the Communist schismatic Jay Lovestone or Socialist Congressman Meyer London. But the protagonist, Avreml, is not Gold. He is rather, as the title promises, “a worker,” his heroism general rather than particular. When Avreml errs in pitying an old Socialist mentor turned strikebreaker, he piously confesses his faults and accepts the Party’s chastisement; when he learns how deeply his wife Miriem is committed to Lovestone’s heretical critique of the Party, he separates from her. Though Gold’s writing is earthy and concrete, his fiction, like his Communist solidarity, aims to transcend the specificity of the self.
Communist universalism also offers a fresh, surprising version of that most familiar American Jewish genre, the ethnic bildungsroman. In novels like Abraham Cahan’s 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky, the protagonist grows in self-consciousness as he (it is usually he) assimilates culturally and ascends the class ladder. As Kaufman astutely notes, Avreml Broide bucks these American dreams. Avreml refuses his father-in-law’s offer to set him up in business, and thus the novel rejects the developmental path from worker to capitalist. Avreml does Americanize, after a fashion, overcoming his shtetl nostalgia through the mass comradery of the union, and learning English in a Communist workers’ school and then in a courtroom, on trial for his role in a bloody strike. He thus comes to illustrate one of the Party’s slogans in the ‘30s, “Communism is 20th-Century Americanism”—yet this Americanism is always understood as tentative, produced and sustained in ongoing class struggle.
And thus the novel devotes nearly half of its 117 pages to Avreml’s youth in a small Eastern European city, a lovely folk-impressionistic yarn reminiscent of Isaac Babel’s short stories or Marc Chagall’s paintings. But that yarn, I suspect, has a straightforward politics, evident in the clear parallels Gold draws between the Old and New Worlds. There, Avreml wrangles with small-time thieves; here, he faces the same venial gangsters. There, a rapacious moneylender extorts and then evicts an impoverished tailor; here, Avreml finds the same capitalist exploitation. You can cross the Atlantic Ocean and learn English, sure, but you cannot escape class struggle. Indeed, the novel ends with Avreml returning to Europe, fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade for a free Spain. To be sure, writing in 1944, Gold sees Spain as the first battleground in the war against fascism, linking it to World War II; in his final letter to his comrades, Avreml writes that he is fighting for “our America and the Jewish people.” For a time, that is, Communist internationalism was compatible with a guarded patriotism and Jewish group loyalty. And yet, this patriotism comes with critique: As Avreml observes, the United States (like other liberal democracies) abandoned the Spanish Republicans, who were armed only by the Soviets. More profoundly, by reversing Avreml’s migration story, Gold completely rewires the immigrant genre in which he is writing, as if the robbers in a heist movie were to give all the money back. Gold thus pointedly defies the literary teleology of the nation. At a moment when many American Jews are grappling with our community’s story of racial assimilation and class ascent, Kaufman has made available, in Gold’s novel, a welcome, if bracing, alternative: an unabashedly leftist story of the Jew who remains proudly, defiantly, a worker.
Jonathan Guyer (interim editor): Saddam Hussein wrote novels. That’s just one fascinating strand in the latest book from Steve Coll, The New Yorker staff writer and accomplished investigative journalist. Coll’s in-depth reading of the Iraqi autocrat’s little-known fiction, and their adaptation to Arabic television, make for some of the most compelling moments of The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. The book is every bit as riveting as Ghost Wars, his monumental 2004 dive into Osama bin Laden’s path to the September 11th attacks.
Coll sets out to understand how the George W. Bush administration got the question of Hussein’s defunct weapons of mass-destruction program so wrong, and his reporting paints remarkably intimate portraits of Iraqi scientists and American spies. For material that broadly speaking is somewhat familiar—the American invasion was a slow-moving train wreck, and we’re still living in the world that Bush wrought—Coll’s book nevertheless feels fresh, even thrilling at times.
But it can be difficult to revisit the material and see so clearly all the potential offramps, so many moments that could have averted the war and altered the course of Iraqi, American, and world history. What if Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had made public his criticism and reservations about a preemptive invasion? I couldn’t help but find myself wondering whether he may have instigated a cascade of departures across the federal government that might have ultimately stopped the war. He publicly stayed loyal to Bush, just as many policymakers and appointees have stayed loyal to Biden during the ongoing Gaza war. There weren’t mass resignations then, or today, and Coll’s book offers a bleak account of the world that unfolds when militaristic frenzy is left unchecked.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): I’ve long thought that one of the most delightful—but also most philosophical—songs ever written is They Might Be Giants’s “Older”: “You’re older than you’ve ever been / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older / And now you’re even older.” I’ve been thinking of these lyrics, at once incontrovertibly obvious and deeply profound, ever since I left a screening of Christian Marclay’s 24-hour masterpiece, The Clock, showing at MoMA through February. This was my third time viewing a chunk of the film, but while I’d previously only taken two-hour gulps, at this showing I sat through four full hours—and got the project in a way I never had before.
As the title suggests, the film is built around clocks: Over the course of the absurd runtime, we see timepieces displaying each of the 1440 minutes of the day in scenes excerpted from I don’t know how many thousands of films (and sometimes TV shows). Sometimes, particularly on the hour, we see several clocks showing a given moment. (Three o’clock is a big one, for obvious reasons—that’s often when kids are released from school.) The clocks in Marclay’s film appear in all manner of locations and designs: They are in train stations and anonymous offices; on wrists, bedside tables, and famous buildings like Big Ben; they’re digital and analog, in Roman and Arabic numerals. Often we see people glancing at their watches without actually learning the time, or we know it only because it’s spoken aloud. On very rare occasions, people in the film explicitly philosophize about time. But mostly, temporality simply unfolds. It’s something that’s always there, and which we’re constantly conscious of even when we’re not conscious of being conscious of it.
The film is usually seen as a curiosity and a tour de force of cinematic editing. But Marclay is doing something far subtler than merely assembling random shots with clocks in them. Sometimes the connecting images are related to each other in one way or another: For instance, in one clip people draw guns and fire, and the shots land in a scene from an entirely different film. One may be in color, the other in black and white, unmooring the historic time of the genre from the chronological time of the film in front of us while also flattening the different scales into a unified flow: Time is one. And even as the minutes tick forward, time in the film is not unidirectional, as certain actors who appear and reappear (Robert DeNiro, Nicolas Cage, Dirk Bogarde, Meryl Streep, Glenn Close) grow older and younger at random. By drawing clips from works both highbrow and lowbrow, and from all across the globe, Marclay emphasizes how all of cinema—and indeed, the entire world—is caught in the same stream of time, which defies the borders of genres and nations.
The Clock is shown such that the time on the screen matches the time in the world. But even so, a few minutes into my viewing, someone took out his cell phone to check the time. There are things I simply cannot accept, and phone use in movie theaters is at the top of the list. So I leaned forward and informed him—though my inner Brooklynite prevented me from expressing myself quite this politely—that we are living the same moment as the people on the screen.
